WICKLIFFE,
Ohio -- Gimme a slice of pepperoni pizza, a beer to wash it down and a shirt bright enough to let me roll a strike in the dark.

That's
the stereotype of bowling.

It's getting to be as out of date as pin boys,
though.

"I
think it's something we really struggle with. You look at people who bowl in leagues, and they're drinking beer. They're eating pizza. That's fine for recreational bowling. But a lot of people don't
understand there's a pro and collegiate
side to the sport," said Nicole Mosesso of Vanderbilt University by way of Centerville, Ohio.

The
National Collegiate Women's Bowling Championships are
in full swing this weekend at The
Game in Wickliffe (Freeway Lanes). The Commodores were the runners-up to Nebraska in last year's NCAA finals. In 2007, the Commodores were national champions.

"We're very well respected at our school because it's the school's only national championship," said Mosesso.

But strong showings by an elite private university that is perennially ranked in the nation's top 20 by US. News &
World Report -- Full
disclosure: Vanderbilt is my alma mater -- haven't changed the image of bowling to many people.

Ten
of Vandy''s top 12 bowlers rank in the top 10 percent of their class. Seven were in the National Honor Society in
high school.

Mosesso is an Alberta Crowe
U.S. Bowling Congress scholarship winner for high academics and a strong
bowling average in high school She has a
3.5 average (out of 4.0) in the interdisciplinary major of
Medicine, Health and Society.

"People
don't understand when they see us in the
weight room that we lift and we run and
we do the same things every
athlete in other sports does. It's just tailored to our sport," said
Mosesso, who has a 191.98
bowling average.

There's
also a technological aspect to the sport that surprises casual fans. Every
member of the teams competing in Wickliffe carries five or six different
bowling balls. They are similar to the different clubs in a golf bag.

The
choice of which ball to use depends on whether the lanes are wood or synthetic material,
on the oil pattern on the surface, and on whether the coating is heavy or light, short
(covering 33 to 36 feet of the 60-foot-long lane) or long (42-to-45 feet.)

Vanderbilt's Natalie Goodman is a junior, like Mosesso. A
left-hander with a 198 average, Goodman majors in Human and Organizational
Development. "When the pros are on TV,
people wonder why scores aren't so high sometimes," said Goodman. "They don't take into
account all the technicalities when you
go out there."

Vandy sophomore
Robyn Renslow with a 201.8 average is one of the nation's premier collegiate
bowlers, as well as an accomplished artist.

The South is supposed to be a college football hotbed, not a bowling paradise. The sport of bowling has such nationwide grassroots popularity, however, that Vanderbilt team members come from Illinois, Michigan, California, Arizona, New Jersey and Ohio.

Bowling has a built-in audience here. In
the 1970s, Cleveland Mayor Ralph Perk's wife Lucille famously turned down an invitation
to the White House from First Lady Pat Nixon because it was Mrs. Perk's bowling night. It only made the couple more popular with their ethnic voting base.

It's
been said that bowling at a high competitive level is like trying to make an
8-to-10-foot putt in golf -- over and over again.

Thus, female
bowlers face the same anxieties as other high-performance athletes. The Vanderbilt
sports psychologist, Vicki Woosley, accompanied the team to the championships.

Furthermore, in bowling, just as in golf, you
can't play defense.

But because golf and tennis are country-club sports and skew to a different demographic,
they have more sophisticated images, at least until the modern competitive dynamic of bowling is examined.

Women's
collegiate bowling is a fixture at many historically black colleges,
with Maryland-Eastern Shore proving adept at recruiting international bowlers.
It's also the domain of schools from the old Division I-AA in football or from
conferences that usually get only one bid to the NCAA basketball tournament,
like the Mid-American, which is the host
conference for the bowling championships.

College
is probably the last and highest level
for most of the bowlers here after the death of the Professional Women's Bowling Association a decade ago. This weekend, there won't be any beers, food orders specifying
"hold the anchovies," or bowling shirts as loud as thunder at the national
championships.

The noise will be the falling pins.

The competition
and the demands it makes mentally and physically will make it more than a game.

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